Abstract
The name of Mykola Dmytrovych Strazhesko is not just a page in the history of Ukrainian medicine. It is a school of clinical thinking. A prominent Ukrainian physician, internist, academician, and one of the founders of domestic cardiology, M. D. Strazhesko belonged to those clinicians for whom a diagnosis was not a matter of "luck" or a set of tests, but the result of thorough intellectual analysis.
His article, written almost a century ago, is striking in its precision. We are accustomed to thinking that diagnostic errors are related to inaccuracies in instrumental and laboratory studies. However, Academician M. D. Strazhesko proves the opposite: technologies can reduce uncertainty, but they do not replace thinking. Moreover, even in the terminal stages of cancer, when symptoms seem "sufficient," doctors make mistakes more often. And this happens not because of a lack of knowledge, but because of traps in interpretation.
We present to the modern physician a master class on what are now called "cognitive errors" that lead to a false diagnosis. In every clinical case, Academician M. D. Strazhesko demonstrates how easy it is to fall into "template thinking": to assign absolute value to a single symptom or even an instrumental examination result, to forget about the dynamics of the process, to begin explaining all facts using one convenient scenario — and to lose sight of the truth.
This article gives the physician a rare opportunity to look at themselves from the outside. Not in the ideal conditions of protocols, but in a real clinic — where symptoms can be masked, diseases can coexist, and data can "conflict" with each other.